July 8th, 2018
Nine months after a succession of hurricanes smashed through the British Virgin Islands, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary ship, Mounts Bay returned to Tortola once again to help with the clean-up. Royal Engineers and soldiers have been assisting locals in clearing debris from beaches, bays and mangroves as part of the wider effort to attract tourists back. In conjunction with the Association of Reef Keepers (ARK) they conducted SeaSweep & SwampSweep at Cane Garden Bay resulting in four large bins overflowing with debris from Cannon Point wetland, Garden Ghut wetland and the bay itself. Great to see the continued progress in the restoration of beaches and wetlands.
BVI Traveller was created in September of 2017 to help tourism in the British Virgin Islands recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma.
To that end, we met our goals. In the past 7 years there have been over 1.2 million visits to the website and over 3 million pages have been viewed. There are over 1,000 pages on the site featuring news posts and detailed listings on all hotels, villas, restaurants and sailing charters located in the BVI. The BVI Government and many business, hotels, villas and sailing charters have all agreed that the site “moved the needle on tourism” after Irma.
The site, however, has run its course. It has served its purpose by bringing visitors and local businesses together to rebuild the tourist industry and it is now time to shut down operations for good.
I want to thank everyone for your help and support.
Chuck Metter